1867, February 22 – March 13: (The Fall of Geffrard: Mutiny, Exile, and the Trap of the Presidency-for-Life): On the night of February 22, 1867, (18) the mut…

1867, February 22 – March 13: (The Fall of Geffrard: Mutiny, Exile, and the Trap of the Presidency-for-Life): On the night of February 22, 1867, (18) the mutinous Tirailleurs — the very recalcitrant young Salnavists whom Geffrard had unwisely drafted into his elite guard to quiet them — stealthily surrounded the Palais National before moonrise and loosed a massive volley into the palace, but instead of killing Geffrard merely awakened him, and supported only by his three sons-in-law and a handful of aides-de-camp, the president seized a carbine and returned fire so vigorously that the hundred-strong mutineers hesitated until a rescue detachment arrived. On March 8, deeply shaken, Geffrard tried belated reforms — a new cabinet, salary cuts, customs reform, freedom of the press, general amnesty — but that very day Victor Chevallier and seventeen confederates landed at St. Marc, received with open arms by Nissage-Saget and Léon Montas, until recently the president’s strongest supporters. Realizing the end had come, Geffrard took counsel with the French chargé, and at three in the morning on March 13, 1867, stole in disguise onto the French sloop-of-war Destin, bound for Jamaica and empty years of exile. (19) Pastor Bird had observed in 1867 that “the chief magistrate, emperor, king, or president has up to the present been the master and not the servant of the country — he has worked his own will rather than that of the people.” The deeper structural answer, however, was that when Geffrard accepted présidence-à-vie he had trapped himself — no way to go but down, no constitutional machinery for transfer of power, no exit — and in these circumstances pent-up political forces could vent themselves only through revolt. Geffrard’s fall confirmed what James had argued about the Haitian political class from Pétion onward: every leader who sought to modernize Haiti within the inherited colonial framework — présidence-à-vie, an army that existed to seize rather than defend, an economy structured around extraction rather than production — was doomed to reproduce the very pathologies he sought to cure.